Bosnia agonizes over release of massacre video

1995 shooting deaths of Muslims from Srebrenica shown on TV

AP

This
image taken from a video purportedly shows the shadow of
a Serbian soldier cast over bound Bosnian Muslim civilian
prisoners taken from Srebrenica to Mount Treskavica, near the
wartime Bosnian Serb capital of Pale, in 1995, where they were killed.

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June
3: Bosnian television aired a video of a 1995 massacre committed by
Serbs in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. But will the people
responsible for the atrocity be punished? NBC's Keith Miller explores.

SARAJEVO,
Bosnia-Herzegovina - Shaken and in tears, Nura Alispahic said Friday
she turned on the TV to watch the news — then saw a gruesome video of
the shooting deaths of her teenage son Azmir and five other Muslims
from Srebrenica by Serb forces in July 1995.

“I
saw with my own eyes when these animals killed my son. He was only 16½.
No one can understand how I feel,” she told The Associated Press.

Bosnian television broadcast the amateur footage, apparently made by Serb troops, on its late-evening news Wednesday.

It
showed six civilians taken from a truck, hands tied behind their backs
and lined up on a hillside. Four were shot — one by one — in the backs.
Two others were ordered to carry the bodies into a barn, where they,
too, were killed.

“I saw him. He was second in the row. They were pushing him,” his mother said. “He turns, and I see him and it was my Azmir.

“Seconds
later, they shoot him. He falls,” said Alispahic, 60, sitting beside
her daughter Magbula in their room in a refugee camp near the northern
town of Tuzla.

Her
other son, Admir, also was killed during the war. He had been wounded
in Srebrenica and evacuated to Tuzla. Shortly after he was released
from the hospital, he was killed during a shelling of the town.

As
many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb
troops overran the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica nearly 10
years ago in Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II.

Video shown to U.N. war crimes courtThe footage was first shown Wednesday at the U.N. war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands.

The
prosecution introduced the video during hearings in the trial of former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted for his alleged role in
atrocities during the Balkan wars, including the Srebrenica massacre.

U.N.
prosecutors contend the killings were carried out by the Serb
paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions somewhere on Mount Treskavica
near the wartime Bosnian Serb capital, Pale.

The
Scorpions allegedly were under orders from Serbian police in Belgrade
and the link could directly tie Milosevic with the crimes committed in
Bosnia.

Azmir’s
body was found buried in a mass grave in 1999 by the Bosnian Federation
Commission for the Search of Missing Persons. He was identified and
reburied in 2003 at the Memorial Cemetery in Potocari, near Srebrenica.

Police
in neighboring Serbia-Montenegro have arrested at least eight men they
say are shown in the video, said Rasim Ljajic, head of the
Serbia-Montenegro government body in charge of cooperation with the
U.N. war crimes tribunal.

'Important to show the world'Munira
Subasic, a representative of the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica,
told AP in Sarajevo that the other victim recognized by his mother from
the footage was 17-year-old Safet Fejzic.

The mother and the family were too shocked to speak to the media, Subasic said.

She
added that the Mothers of Srebrenica association planned to meet with
the chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte,
who was visiting Bosnia on Friday.

“We
will demand that she gives us the entire two hour-long footage of the
killings,” Subasic said. “Maybe someone else can recognize their next
of kin as well.”

She
said they also want the entire video broadcast worldwide. “It is very
important to show to the world the crimes committed here. Such genocide
cannot and must not be unpunished.”

Squeezing her shaking hands, Nura Alispahic remembered the last time she saw Azmir.

“Serbs
were entering Srebrenica, and Azmir came back to give me a kiss before
he fled,” she said, sobbing. “I had a feeling then that I would never
see him again.”